Quotation
Last reviewed:
“If God exists, whence comes evil? Yet whence comes good, if He exists not?”
Boethius · Late Roman philosophy · Medieval · c. 524
What does it mean?
The usual reading treats the two questions as a dilemma the prisoner is stuck in: evil seems to refute a god, and good seems to refute the absence of one. A competing reading files the line as Boethius's own theology. In the book it is reported speech. The prisoner, not yet consoled, says a disciple asked it, and he asks it because villains succeed while God is supposed to be watching. It stands in book I, prose 4, during the complaint, before Philosophy has moved him off fortune and onto the good. The Consolation will not answer with a slogan. It will argue about providence, fate, and what counts as evil. The question is the sore the rest of the book presses.
Did Boethius really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. H. R. James's English. In the prose the prisoner says a disciple asked this. It is not Lady Philosophy's conclusion. The familiar longer form about 'so many evils' is a different English of the same Latin question.
Where it comes from
The Consolation of Philosophy I, prose 4, in H. R. James's translation
Approximate date: c. 524.
How to use it
A person in a hospital corridor in Glasgow who says both 'how can there be a God' and 'where is any of this kindness from' in the same hour is in the prisoner's bind, not in a debate club. The sentence does not settle the bind. It stops you treating one half as the whole complaint. Philosophy's later argument is that the goods people think the wicked won were never the good. That answer is not this sentence. This sentence is the protest.
A mindset reading
Hold the two questions together long enough to see that each ruins the easy version of the other. The habit is not to tattoo either question as a verdict. Boethius stages it as something said to Philosophy, which means the book thinks it has a reply. Quoting only the first half makes him a sceptic he was not, in this dialogue, trying to remain.
Understand the philosophy
Book I is the prisoner's charge against fortune and against the sight of successful wickedness. The key point of prose 4 is that the charge is intellectual as well as personal: if God, whence evil; if no God, whence good. Lady Philosophy does not scoff. She diagnoses a forgetting of who he is. Later books relocate evil as weakness and tie happiness to the good. The question is the door, not the last page.
- meaning
- ethics
- knowledge
FAQ
What does it mean?
The usual reading treats the two questions as a dilemma the prisoner is stuck in: evil seems to refute a god, and good seems to refute the absence of one. A competing reading files the line as Boethius's own theology. In the book it is reported speech. The prisoner, not yet consoled, says a disciple asked it, and he asks it because villains succeed while God is supposed to be watching. It stands in book I, prose 4, during the complaint, before Philosophy has moved him off fortune and onto the good. The Consolation will not answer with a slogan. It will argue about providence, fate, and what counts as evil. The question is the sore the rest of the book presses.
Did Boethius really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. H. R. James's English. In the prose the prisoner says a disciple asked this. It is not Lady Philosophy's conclusion. The familiar longer form about 'so many evils' is a different English of the same Latin question.
Which work is it in?
The Consolation of Philosophy I, prose 4, in H. R. James's translation Approximate date: c. 524.